Victor Mair has a fascinating post at the Log about the Chinese character 和 hé ("harmony, peace"). It starts from the relatively uninteresting fact that it has been chosen "The Most 'Chinese' Chinese Character," as the title of Josh Chin's Wall Street Journal story has it, but Mair goes on to point out that it is used to write at least five other words or morphemes beyond the one in question, and that the Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese by Yuen Ren Chao and Lien Sheng Yang and the Gwoyeu Tsyrdean (Guoyu Cidian) give different sets of six pronunciations:
It is interesting that, on the Mainland, the language authorities have declared that the pronunciation hàn ("with, and") no longer exists, and we cannot find it in even such unabridged dictionaries of record as Hanyu Da Zidian... and Hanyu Da Cidian.... Thus, on the Mainland, people do not understand me when I say the name of one of my favorite series in Taiwan, Shū hàn Rén 書和人 (Books and People), a set of books that I avidly devoured in Taiwan four decades ago, and can still today buy new volumes under the same title and with the same pronunciation.
Then he goes on to discuss the history of the character:
Even its graphic form is complicated by the fact that 和 is actually an early (probably more than a couple of thousand years old) simplified character. The original form — going all the way back to the oracle bone inscriptions 3,200 years ago — was 龢, with 22 strokes. On the left is a musical instrument, now called yuè, which depicts a mouth blowing over a row of windpipes — this is the semantophore, which conveys the notion of "harmony" or, perhaps more accurately, something like "consonance" (not of the verbal sort, but of the musical type), or just "having to do with a pleasant sound." On the right was the phonophore, hé 禾 ("cereal crop, millet"), which functioned as the sound-bearing element. Later, people surely must have grown weary of writing all those strokes for the row of musical pipes and their openings at the top, and decided to dispense with them, leaving just the mouth that blew into the openings of the pipes. This (the mouth), somewhat surprisingly, got shifted to the right side of the character, hence the character was transformed from the cumbersome 龢 to the streamlined, but less explicit, 和. I say that the move of the mouth from the left to the right is rather unexpected, because usually characters with mouth radicals — of which there are roughly two thousand — have the mouth on the left side, where it began (top left) in the old form of 龢.
Read more at languagehat
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